The gods offer no rewards for intellect. There was never one yet that showed any interest in it. --Mark Twain

September 04, 2011

Scary Jesus Warriors, or When is a Fact not a Fact

The normally solid Religion News Service, for which I have occasionally freelanced in recent years, has a piece on Dominionism that was picked up by Huff Post, and that, as they say in prognostication and prophecy, is a bad sign. Titled 5 Facts About Dominionism, the piece is written by Daniel Burke, who, according to what I can tell, writes about religion more frequently than most. With a resumé like his, it's a wonder a story goes this far wrong, but I suspect that has to do with the obscurity of the topic, not the talent of the writer. In all fairness, I'm a huge Huff Post fan, but they do tend to skew slightly (completely) left in the area of politics, and in a season where religion can mean anything from burning a living woman on a funeral pyre to feeding homeless people (thanks, Leighton, for pointing out the absurdity of the word as a category marker), mixing the two can often serve the best interests of the obscurantists and conspiracy theorists.

The piece runs into trouble almost immediately by telling readers they'll be offered five "facts" to help them decide for themselves. Um, with all the gentleness I can muster, I should point out that the public is occasionally disqualified from "deciding for themselves" if what they want is accuracy. One cannot decide for herself about evolution, medicine, differential equations, or obscure theological concepts after reading five ostensible facts about those fields in a short news piece. The idea is silly at best and pandering at worst.

As to the facts, even the first is wrong, sort of. Burke writes: "'Dominionism' generally describes the belief that Christians are biblically mandated to control all earthly institutions until the second coming of Jesus." Well, not exactly. I suppose there are five or six Christians, including the lunatic Gary North and his now deceased father-in-law R.J. Rushdoony, who would define it thus, but to borrow an idea from Jon Stewart, if all their followers gathered in one place at one time, the fire marshall would say, "Yeah, that's fine." I read Rushdoony, North, Schlossberg, Colson, and others in the 80s and 90s. I even briefly embraced the idea that the Church needed to "influence" certain areas of culture. It never occurred to me that we were to "control" all earthly institutions, and how long is that list? Sanitation? Bakeries? Girl Scout Troops? Breweries? Whore houses? (Nope, that one would definitely be gone in Rushdoony-land.) There are even some in the Dominionist camp called preterists who don't believe there will not be a Second Coming. Oversimplifying often leads to simply being wrong.

Burke then cites "experts" who categorize Dominionists into two main camps: Reconstructionists and New Apostolic Reformation. The first group is clearly Dominionists. It includes Rushdoony and North. Schlossberg, especially in his best known work, Idols for Destruction: The Conflict of Christian Faith and American Culture, is closer to Edmund Burke in temperament than he is to Rushdoony, which is to say he's an old school conservative, not a Reconstructionist. This is not to say his later works in the Turning Point series weren't slightly deranged. They clearly were, and adding Marvin Olasky to the mix didn't help his credibility. For a while, he was to be the new Francis Schaeffer, like we need another one. More on the second group below.

Back to the experts. Who are the experts who categorize these groups? Journalists? Professors? If he interviewed Noll or Marsden, I might trust the response, but I have no idea who these alleged experts are. How does one get to be an expert on Dominionism, and if they are experts, why include C. Peter Wagner and the NAR in the same breath as Rushdoony? The two are so markedly different that their only similarities are Jesus, the Bible, and prayer, a list that makes all Christians dominionists, it seems. Again, in fairness, Wagner does have a book with a super scary title, Dominion!: How Kingdom Action Can Change the World, but to understand Wagner's dominion requires much more subtlety than lumping him in with people who have genuinely scary ideas.

For a brief period in 1999, I toyed with the idea of attending Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena so that I could study with Wagner and others on the Fuller faculty. I wanted a graduate degree in theology, so it seemed best to avoid ORU and go to a legitimate school where the Charismatic movement was taken seriously and studied in a scholarly manner. Yes, I was a little bit naive in those days, clearly. I liked much of what Wagner was doing because he practiced dominionism the way all amillenialists practiced dominionism: Jesus rules the world today, not in some future millenial kingdom, by means of His Body, the Church, and prayer is the principal means by which change happens, followed by good works, and a discernible lack of douchiness. I know, scary shit, right? Unbelievers, take heart, those scary Jesus warriors are just praying for you, and we all have evidence of how well that doesn't work, eh?

Burke lists a couple more in the movements, most notably Mike Bickle at the International House of Prayer in Kansas City. Yes, IHOP, like the pancake joint, and whereas the original IHOP can at least bring about change in terms of your waistline, the NAR's IHOP promises to do very little but irritate theologians churchwide as they pray against "demonic principalities" in the world. They even have a "war room" where these powers and principalities are tracked, but relax, their "battle is not against flesh and blood..."

One thing Burke and his experts get right is that no one who matters in evangelical Chrisitainity is a Dominionist. No one. There are similarities between Dominionism and evangelicalism, but they are the "family resemblance" variety, not the "we believe the same things" variety. The difficulty will be to keep journalists and talking heads from exercising shallow variations of political and theological pareidolia, that psychological reflex to find patterns where none exist or which simply resemble a known quantity. That has already happened when the increasingly insane and apparently electable Rick Perry makes statements that sound "dominiony." Certain segments of press and public already hear him as a right wing jesus loon, so it's easy to hear him as a Dominionist. That he invited NAR representatives to his prayer meeting/ego masturbation event in Texas troubles me not at all in terms of its import for American politics (except the whole separation issue). Prayer has never changed anything, not that anyone can prove, anyway, so it's unlikely a bunch of guys praying demons away is going to affect anything other than the public's perception of Perry as an increasingly bizarre candidate.